Monthly Archives: October 2014

Technology

Latest Computer build: RAID fileserver and media center

Had the idea in my head for a while now about doing a fileserver build to put all my media in one place. This includes years of movies, music and TV shows along with about 100GB of music rips. The goals of this were pretty simple:

  • Have some form of redundancy, most likely in a RAID 1 or RAID 5 format
  • Have enough horsepower to stream movies/videos on the fly, including conversions
  • Have enough storage for all my current collection (~1.5TB) and future

At this point, I had some extra components lying around and got a sweet deal on an ASUS 990X motherboard and a set of 6 hard drives. Let’s get to the specs:

  • ASUS 990X Sabertooth motherboard
  • Corsaid 500W PSU
  • Mushkin 240GB SSD
  • (6) 750GB WD Black hard drives
  • AMD 3.5GHz 8-Core CPU
  • Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler
  • AMD 7770 GPU card with 2GB GDDR5 RAM
  • Rosewill Stealth tower
  • (2) Inline SATA power cords
  • (6) 90 Degree SATA cables

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Technology

Monitoring System: Update 1

So I’ve been working with this project off and on, mainly off due to time constraints with a new work shift/promotion. I’ve split the logs and dashboard readouts to allow for easier pulling of individual data. What this allowed me to do was to couple this with WordPress using iFrame to load the individual pieces. I then set up multiple pages for each PHP document to allow the refreshes to work normally. I’ve build and gotten a working version of a single ping test, so that’s off the checklist. My next goal is to build a queue of sorts to pull information from for a polling cycle depending on type of test, then run the tests I want. I’m starting with ICMP, but hope to go for basic SNMP once this works out. Stay tuned as always!